


Peer

by bluesyturtle



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Anatomy, Biblical References, Blood, Crucifixion, Gen, How Do I Tag, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Manipulation, Mild Gore, Mukozoke, Obsession, Pain, Psychology, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Revenge, Sadism, Season 2, Serial Killers, The Pool Scene, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-02
Updated: 2014-04-02
Packaged: 2018-01-17 21:27:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1403035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Suppose it’d gone a bit differently at the swimming pool.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peer

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amare/gifts).



> _Place your stamp here / Send out love letters / C'mon enough said / The skin on top his hands / Has dried to red / The words, want them touch them / The nerve, why are you here_

Hannibal Lecter is heavier than he looks. It’s a fitting trade to make, and Matthew isn’t surprised it takes some effort to haul him out of the pool.

He has an idea about Hannibal Lecter. He has a working theory and something like faith in Will Graham.

Someone so precise, so meticulous, wouldn’t send Matthew after anyone modest or domesticated. Will Graham wants him tested; wants him prime and wants him _worthy._ And Matthew, he can be that to Will Graham. He can be what Hannibal Lecter couldn’t or wouldn’t be; what Will Graham refused to accept of him—he can be a true partner, and not someone who will betray him when the going gets tough.

Matthew heard all about it: heard all about Graham’s allegations of malpractice and misconduct. It was one of the things that drew him to Will Graham in the first place, his unwillingness to accept the complementary fame of his guilt. Will Graham isn’t like most of the ones Matthew sees in Chilton’s hospital. He’s a lot like Abel Gideon; the two of them are collected, lucid, and present in the same way.

Graham’s biggest similarity to Gideon is probably the claim he made upon incarceration. They both claimed to be someone they weren’t. Gideon said he was the Chesapeake Ripper; Graham said he wasn’t a killer at all. Matthew likes to pride himself on being able to spot a con when he sees one. It does take a murderer to know a murderer.

So maybe Will Graham wasn’t one or didn’t _want_ to be one, but things change. People change.

When all a man has is time, his mind can either sharpen or turn on him. Sometimes it can do both of those things. And Will Graham, well, he has time. He has oodles.

He supposes Hannibal Lecter has time, too. At least he probably thinks he does. Matthew has an idea about how Lecter’s been using his time—whether he’s dedicated it to sharpening his mind or to self-destructing.

It’s a sloppy thing to be killed like this, even if Matthew does mean for it to be beautiful. It will be artistic, not unlike the judge killed and trussed in the very courtroom where Will Graham’s fate would be decided and undoubtedly brought to an untimely end. Matthew had tried to set the scales right. He’d _tried_ to exonerate Will Graham in the only way he could conceive of doing so at the time, with what resources he had. He’d used his in; he’d built Will Graham an altar out of charred human remains mounted atop a stag’s head; he’d proven himself loyal.

And what had Hannibal Lecter done for Will Graham; what had he done _to_ Will Graham?

Will pointed the finger, and Matthew didn’t forget about that. Hell no, he didn’t forget, and when Will dropped the name in his cell as the object to Matthew’s subject…no, he didn’t forget what Will Graham had said in the beginning. Everyone else may have forgotten, swept it under the rug, and forgiven the wrongful accusation, but not Matthew. Will Graham is sublimity personified. Matthew could never forget anything about him.

The gravity dragging on Hannibal Lecter’s unconscious limbs has nothing to do with the water clinging to him. Heavy sins weigh heavily on a body. Matthew has the scene assembled completely in the stage of his mind, has it worked out and teased down to static and fibers. He drapes the body on a cross, roughly hewn and functionally symbolic more than it is ornate. The cross is fastened to his arms first as a precautionary measure; then comes the noose, and there goes the bucket, neatly tucked beneath Hannibal Lecter’s shapely bare feet.

The man is built for the cross, and the cross is built for the lowest of criminals. But again, ironically, so did a cruel cross serve the Most High, and Matthew considers, tending toward the line of sympathetic reasoning, that perhaps Hannibal Lecter will be immortalized for being killed this way. He decides it’s of no consequence, or at least, it isn’t the most important component. His death will be grotesque, like a friend killing an enemy he once thought to be his friend. It will be personal and intimate, and Matthew will make it hurt. 

Will Graham will always know Matthew did it, and Matthew will always know whose hand really dragged the blade across this flesh, this living, breathing flesh. Even better, so will Hannibal Lecter.

While Lecter groans in his subdued state, Matthew opens his veins. He does this like he’s hollowing out trenches in the mud to catch the rainwater. He opens them wide like a psyche cracked open because if no one knows Graham asked Matthew to do this, there’s a chance Crawford will show him the pictures, and he’s positive no one has any way of knowing or of even suspecting him. They’d been discreet.

Chilton will never guess about the wires; he trusts Matthew at a level where he may as well be invisible, so vast are his freedoms. Chilton can’t be blamed, really. The beauty of camouflage is that he could have been anyone, just like Will Graham just like Hannibal Lecter was, is anyone: just an FBI profiler, just a psychiatrist, just an orderly—just a chameleon, hiding in the overhanging foliage blossoming out of the houseplants.

The point is they’re connected, the three of them. Matthew’s tempted, oh, he’s _so_ tempted to dismiss Graham’s interest in his prospective kill as a grudge. He _wants_ it to be that simple, but he gives himself more credit than that. He gives Graham more credit than that. Unfortunately, he gives Hannibal Lecter more credit than that, much as he’d _like_ for there to be nothing to it, nothing personal wrinkling this experience.

The thing is he’d read about Hannibal Lecter and Tobias Budge and Franklyn Froidevaux. He’d read about a girl named Abigail Hobbs and her dead parents. He hadn’t seen it, for a long time he hadn’t.

No one else looked receptive to it either. It’s easier to believe the good doctor got caught up in another killer’s madness than to believe he instigated the storm, and it’s a much pleasanter world to breathe within where all he’d done to Abigail Hobbs was save her life. Easiest of them all is to believe Will Graham lost his mind. It’s a safer, more comfortable reality than wondering if Hannibal Lecter did.

If Lecter did something terrible to Will Graham, then Lecter is something terrible to be dealt with. If Will Graham was and continues to be the focus of a man like that, then Will Graham is much more than perhaps he ever wished to be.

 _Imagine if they started working together,_ Matthew had said to him.

Will Graham, Matthew had heard, could imagine just about anything. Matthew thrills to think he could be imagining _him_ now, carrying out his request.

Matthew doesn’t ask questions where the answers don’t come naturally. He doesn’t do favors unless his services are directly requested—doesn’t like to pry or to show his hand unless an invitation is first extended. Graham had given him the second, and he could wait patiently for the first one; he could wait until he’d earned his right to it. He could wait. He could do this again, for an artist, for a friend. It had been so courteous of him, after all, to request an audience with him so formally, so politely.

So when Will named his terms and called his price, Matthew agreed obsequiously. There hadn’t been another answer to give.

Graham wasn’t specific about the _how_ of their arrangement: whether he’d prefer it Lecter suffered or if he felt the blow that killed him. Matthew’s decision, after excessive planning, had been to model the one who’d followed his example. It’s poetic, really, dealing out this murder in the fashion of one who’d imitated him and fooled everyone, even Will Graham—everyone except Matthew, naturally.

His tributary offering will always be overshadowed by the artistry of the one who killed the judge. That second death dwarfed Matthew’s contribution. This third death will redeem him, in his own eyes and in Will’s.

That had been an ugly moment for Matthew, Will’s innocently curious inquiry as to whether the judge had been his as well. He’d been mortified, a touch ashamed, to tell him no. It begged the question, least of all in Matthew’s mind: _What would have happened to him if there hadn’t been someone else, Matthew; who would have cleaned up your mess after the alibi you made got thrown out; who would have rescued Will Graham from the death penalty?_

Questions upon questions upon questions, yet there are no answers to be had wherever he looks. Right now Matthew looks at Hannibal Lecter, and even more questions bloom eagerly on his tongue. They’re questions to which he has wisps and fragments of solutions, but the sum of them presents an enigma.

Matthew reads body language, deeper than just skin and sympathicotonia. Matthew reads the coiling of muscles, the changes in breathing, the carnal gradation of marble flesh tinting with a deep coral stain. Matthew reads attraction, too; excitement, intrigue, desire. When Will Graham sees the photos for the first time, Matthew intends to be there. He’ll watch what happens with the lines around his mouth, the jumping beat in his neck, the shifts in his posture. It’d been so enticing watching Will in his cage, opening the door for him, and then standing there, the two of them, unshackled and unlimited.

He’d held his hand to his lips and smiled, and Will took his steps, unguided and beleaguered by no one. He should always stand that way, had been Matthew’s thought, a true hawk, proud and solitary and crowned with the majesty of a comet at perihelion.

Hannibal Lecter starts to blink out of his stupor halfway through trench number two. Trench number one bleeds in a steady drip down his arm. The Crucified moans, a softer sound than before, supple at the end with a strange, pleasant lift like a question. Matthew takes Lecter’s chin in his hand and holds until he blinks awake. His eyes slide in and out of focus, pupils dilating once.

“Hello, hello,” Matthew murmurs, holding on a moment longer and waiting for the inevitable jerk and panicked weeping to commence.

Sometimes he likes to hear them beg, delights in refusing them their salvation. He craves that surge, that downpour, but he isn’t disappointed or surprised when Lecter proves himself to be elusive. Matthew just releases him and goes back to trench number two. Hannibal Lecter winces, but he doesn’t flinch away from the blade while Matthew works. It would be a futile struggle; Matthew sees him catalogue his bonds, subtly twitching certain parts of his body to test their efficacy.

His movements, minute though they are, push his muscles through cycles of motion: roiling sinews coloring and molding the skin. The valleys in Lecter’s wrists are angry red gouges, unsmiling mouths carved into the intermediate antebrachial vein.

Matthew studies Hannibal Lecter in his silent contemplation of his situation, of his pending execution—and that’s what this is for all its deliberation. He listens to the shuffle of the bucket knocking one way and then the other beneath his feet.

“I bet you had the steadiest hands when you were a surgeon,” he notes, drawing a lazy hand along his chest and swiping distractedly at one nipple with bloody, nimble fingers.

He looks down and analyzes the red smear pressed into his skin like an impasto brushstroke. Right along the ridges of the cooling, dried mark sits his fingerprint, hiding with the devil in the details. He’d been listening, too, right along with Chilton during Will Graham’s chat with Abel Gideon. Matthew had been able to anticipate this turn of events, which makes him realize, belatedly, that perhaps a link could be traced after all, to Hannibal Lecter, least of all; to Graham, surely. Gideon may have heard what they were up to.

There’s nothing for it, but there’s a sense of urgency and anticipation thrumming in his fingertips now. A thicker mist of danger occludes his judgment, but it’s nothing to slow down or break for. It’s a reason to keep moving.

Hannibal Lecter is watching him when he looks up. He wouldn’t be looking anywhere else. Matthew is his entire world. Matthew is all his world will be until he bleeds out or gives up. He smiles, the same wide, blissful smile he hid from Will upon freeing him, for just a short while, from his cage.

Hannibal Lecter is free, too, suspended over that teetering, overturned bucket. He’s free to die and free to wait for death; he’s free to be exactly who he is, unobstructed, while Matthew watches him slip away in increments. He’s free to show Matthew whatever it was that Graham saw and rejected or just plain couldn’t have under the circumstances. Matthew has a feeling about that as well. Hannibal sucks in a strained, noisy breath, and Matthew turns and sits, playing with the switchblade he removes from his pocket. It knocks one way against his knuckles and then the other.

“Judas had the decency to hang himself in shame at his betrayal, but…I thought you needed help,” he supplies a few more long seconds into the silence.

Lecter waits, and that’s fine. He should save his breath for the words that need to be said. If there _are_ words like that, Matthew will hear them. Probably, Lecter won’t tell him. He doesn’t want to tell him he killed the judge, doesn’t want to _claim_ his identity, prolific and praiseworthy as it is.

He _says_ praiseworthy. A better word might be enviable. Matthew isn’t shy; he isn’t insecure in his abilities. As a matter of _retribution,_ Matthew asks for the truth. He can’t conceive of why Lecter would keep it from him now. Obviously Matthew doesn’t ask because he _needs_ to ask. He asks for the satisfaction of a purloined confession. He asks because it feels good to take from Hannibal Lecter and make him rue the day he interfered.

He doesn’t like the taste of his actions being confused with another’s, not when Will is the one making that mistake. Based on the way Lecter’s eyes flash when Matthew says he’ll be the Ripper after he’s killed, Matthew can tell Lecter doesn’t like the taste of it either. His body betrays the truth, or maybe Lecter betrays the truth and his body is a tool the way Matthew’s body is Will’s tool. He likes the way that sounds and considers saying it to make Lecter jealous. He’s fascinated actually, cares to see if it would do anything at all.

He stands and puts his face near Lecter’s face, watches his constricted pupils dilate again. It’s interesting, the question of this man’s body as an ornament and a sacrifice. The longer he stands here and pieces together the deaths and the lives and the secrets, the less Matthew trusts himself to understand it all.

“Admit it,” he drawls. “You’re a bit perplexed about all this.”

Hannibal Lecter’s eyes drift toward the exit, and Matthew looks, but there’s no one there. He turns back to his victim with a patient smile. It’s harder to place, but he attributes his calm to Lecter’s suffering. He makes the reason for his softly murmured words the strain in Lecter’s body, the obvious pain that Matthew put there.

“You know, even if I changed my mind, there’s nothing I could do to take it back now.”

It’s not an apology, but it’s something. Maybe it’s regret. At the very least it’s indecision.

“This will change him,” Lecter rasps, sounding cloudy and far-off.

Matthew assumes some semblance of mercy and says, gently, “He’s changed already.” He steps around the conjoined rivers of Hannibal Lecter’s blood, the balls of his feet sticking and peeling wetly off the red sheen that paints the tile.

Hannibal Lecter’s eyes roll, and his mouth gapes for oxygen. Matthew touches his cheek, his fingers loving.

He muses, beaming, “You made sure of that.”

Lecter’s lips press together, blue and trembling finely. Matthew watches them with interest and steals a kiss off one sweating, twitching palm instead. It’s whimsy more than it is lust or passion of the kill. He’s here as a manifestation of rage, an aimed weapon poised for battle. He’s here as Will Graham.

He feels vaguely like Will might see all of this for himself when he “reconstructs” the crime scene: the Judas kiss. The blade in Matthew’s hand weighs soft and metallic like thirty pieces of silver. The only problem with Hannibal as Christ and Matthew as Judas is Matthew has already chosen his Christ figure. He’s already fashioned a forsaken Son out of Will Graham. He’s here to make his love known in blood.

It’s a given, in Matthew’s mind, that the FBI will drop this case file in Will’s lap and ask him why. Even if they never detect his hand in it, they will show him all the evidence and ask Will what he sees. Matthew shivers and smiles, moving his lips around the side of Hannibal Lecter’s wrist. His skin pricks because Will will see him.

He whispers, intimately, his nose pressed into the backs of Lecter’s knuckles, “I should have disemboweled you.”

Hissing and coughing his sibilants, Hannibal Lecter replies, “Like others for our spoils shall we return.”

“Hmm?”

Matthew Brown takes a step back to appreciate the mastery of his handiwork. Lecter has become a treasure to him, wonderfully sublime in the act of dying. He _says_ sublime, but Matthew isn’t afraid.

Lecter continues, “But not that any one may…” He struggles to swallow around his noose. “…May them revest.”

“I’m not going to take your organs,” Matthew assures him, reaching up to caress Lecter’s face in long, soothing strokes.

He’s a drugged animal, a fatally wounded beast drawn out of his subtle hiding place and made to die a public, private death. Matthew taps Lecter’s quivering bottom lip with his fingertips, the blood congealed and flaked along his nail beds and dried into the whorls of his fingerprints and the grooves of his cuticles. Matthew leans in and shapes his lips carefully, worshipfully, against that sweating skin flavored and scented by the chlorine from the pool. Lecter doesn’t smell like fear; he doesn’t feel like despair. Matthew respects his coherence, admires his clarity.

A small part of his worship finds its derivative in lust. He isn’t ashamed. He coos, “I don’t want to eat your sins, Dr. Lecter. You fed enough of them to Will Graham.”

Lecter sputters, eyes pinching closed and the bucket scraping insistently beneath his feet, “Ask him.”

These are the words Matthew yearns to hear. These are the ones.

“Ask him what?” He licks his lips and stands closer as if to take another kiss, but that time has come and ebbed like an eddying wave. “What do you want me to ask him?”

“Ask if…”

He pauses to breathe, and his eyelids flutter. Unacceptable if it ends too soon, if it ends now. 

Matthew murmurs, “Ask if what?” He steps forward and presses his ear to Hannibal’s chest, listens for the dull, stuttering heartbeat. He wraps his arms around Lecter’s back and lifts him just so, just enough to take the pressure off the noose, though that may not be his biggest concern anymore. Hannibal gasps, throat hoarse and choked for oxygen.

“Ask him _what_ , Doctor?”

The strangled reply comes, “If he feels powerful.”

“What?”

Matthew looks up the length of Hannibal Lecter’s abdomen, confusion written clearly into the arches of his eyebrows and the deep frown of his mouth.

“Those are your last words to the man who killed you?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Hannibal pants, eyes drifting closed again. A ghostly pallor has made a home in his complexion. “He will.”

“Oh,” Matthew laughs. “ _Oh,_ a coded message. How _romantic_.” Matthew lowers Hannibal Lecter carefully back onto the bucket and waits until his breathing returns to its shallow, labored push-and-pull before speaking again. “Is that what you would say to him right now if he were here? He is here, you know.”

He lets go of Hannibal and delights in the long, tortured moan the restored tension teases out of his throat.

“These hands—” he breathes, laying his hands on Hannibal’s navel and ribcage. He holds there, fingers probing until Lecter looks back at him. “Tonight they answer to Will Graham.” He pauses, breathless when he adds, “All of me does.”

Something flashes again in Hannibal’s eyes, and yes, _there_ , right there: the pressure point. _Jealousy_ storms just under the veil of his skin, flaring and upsetting his sympathetic nervous system. Matthew grins and drops his hands to his sides.

“I might have guessed.” He bites his lip. “Still only concerned about whether he feels powerful killing you?”

Enunciating a great deal but still sputtering and pausing to breathe, he says, a smirk splitting his quavering, coughing mouth, “Tell him I’m proud of him.”

_And the Devil did grin…_

Hannibal Lecter’s feet kick out to knock the bucket away, and the action drops him down to Matthew’s level, where he’s standing flat on his feet. That precious moment of awe and gratification to have smothered the smoke, to have beaten the devil, stuns him. Matthew doesn’t move when the short drop of the rope puts Hannibal Lecter’s mouth right there against his throat.

The inevitable jerk comes too late, but rather than weeping, Matthew screams. The rope beneath Hannibal’s chin means he can’t bite at the optimal angle, but he gnashes his teeth anyway, legs flailing and arms convulsing against their posts.

Matthew roars something vulgar and vicious, finagling the switchblade out of his pocket and forcing it into him somewhere near his diaphragm. He stabs twice before Hannibal’s jaw slackens enough for Matthew to stagger away from him, clapping a hand over the spurting wound in his neck. He can only just hear a door banging solidly into the wall over the blood pounding in his ears.

Hannibal Lecter’s chin is a waterfall of blood and saliva: his, Matthew’s, some of it may as well be Will Graham’s.

Footsteps tell him to run, so he does. His blood is here; his face is seared into Hannibal’s memory; _someone_ other than Will, Matthew, or Hannibal can place him at this crime scene, incomplete or no. Matthew retrieves the duffel bag he brought with him into this room, and he runs.

He runs through the labyrinth of hallways and obscure locker rooms, finds a towel to press to the gushing fountain that is his neck, and flees for his car. There’s no one on the far side of the building where he parked, though a woman screams after him as he peels out of the parking lot, steering with one hand and depressing the gas pedal too aggressively to put himself below the radar. He drives for thirty minutes, regulating his physiology in twelve and structuring his behavior in the remaining eighteen. He’s bled well into his lap and all over the upholstery.

It’s fine. He’s never felt more invigorated.

The problem is he’ll have to face Will Graham, and he’ll know just by looking at him. He’ll see his overconfidence as readily as Matthew identifies dishonesty and truth in the cast of a person’s eyes or the set of their shoulders. He pretends it’s all biology because it’s easier to explain. Will pretends it’s all empathy because biology would mean he couldn’t help being whatever it is that people have forced him to become.

He thought he’d known what Hannibal Lecter’s classification was. He promised not to take pieces of Hannibal away with him, and here he’d taken his teeth marks, his saliva, and the pure violence of his survival.

There’s something else he feels like he’s taken, though it’s a small victory, puny. Lecter had shown his cards, more than any stranger ever had a right to witness. Even if Matthew’s been coerced into running, he puts it down it as a win that at least he got in his punches. At least they were heavy-handed; at least he made them count for something, even if that something is just his pride.

Matthew uses the back entrance into the hospital. He’s more than invisible in this environment; all the keys have been entrusted to him. He dons the first lab coat he finds hanging on the back of a computer chair and switches off the camera feeds for the corridor he needs to use first. The footage presently recorded he deletes. He goes through these motions more out of habit than anything else. He’s comfortable in the routine, even if it won’t save him now.

Unseen and composed for the most part, he makes his way to the cabinet at the end of the hall stocked with medical supplies and deposits what he needs into the deep pockets of the stolen, ill-fitting white coat. He slips into the locker room, tends to the, admittedly minor, abuse Lecter wrecked on his neck, and throws what he doesn’t use into the incinerator. The next stop he goes for without any kind of hesitation. The guards let him through when he waves a clipboard in their faces with Chilton’s forged signature across the bottom, shakes a vial of nondescript capsules he picked up on his way in.

Jeff and Liev know Matthew. They know he works the night shift, know he isn’t above doing Chilton’s dirty work. They don’t know he has dirty work of his own to sort through. He moves only as fast as he knows he can get away with once they let him through, because this is his only chance. This is _their_ only chance.

He counts his blessings that Will suffers from the same insomnia that Matthew himself does. He _says_ insomnia, but he’s probably up _waiting_ for Matthew, waiting for a report.

“Come on.” His voice trembles. “Interview.”

Will stands quickly, back straight. He knows what happened. He knows, maybe, that there’s a possibility Hannibal survived the attempt on his life. Matthew’s hands shake locking up Will’s cuffs and opening his cell. The walk out is easier. Will faces away from him, so he doesn’t have to see the disappointment on his face that flickered there for a moment, maybe two.

There’s confusion on Will’s face more than anything else when Matthew walks him into the same cage he’d visited him in before. He leaves the door open, but he leaves Will in his handcuffs. The keys jingle against his bouncing knee.

“Son of a bitch bit me,” he says in the way of an explanation.

Will intones, expression an intriguing cross between exasperation and weariness, “He’s a cannibal.”

The man in the cage watches him, eyes dark and solemn and final. He’s waiting like Matthew waited; waiting for the words he made this damning trip to communicate to him. Matthew has proven by now that he has a penchant for giving Will just what he wants, so he folds without the slightest amount of resistance.

He breathes, eyes wide open and wild for not wanting to miss a single change in Will’s expression, “Do you feel powerful?”

His heart breaks, in a funny, bleary kind of way that has nothing to do with love and has everything to do with reality; the reality that his idol used him like a common tool, that he’d known all along, and that he’d let it happen anyway. His heart breaks because it’s there in Will’s face, the fulfillment of Hannibal Lecter’s prophesy: _You wouldn’t understand. He will._

And Will does; Matthew can taste the recognition like he can taste the blood adhering to the inside of his cheek. He longs for a comprehensive word to describe what the delivered question _does_ to Will Graham, the resolute statue. The emotional response is physical, visceral. His nostrils flare once, his jaw clenches, and his chin tucks forward into his chest. He expels a harsh breath that becomes a laugh, a mirthless, empty chuckle.

It lends something dynamic to his rigid posture, relaxes something that was unyielding.

Matthew’s angry, so he doesn’t wait for this response to dwindle. The words drop acerbically from his lips: “He wanted me to tell you he’s proud of you.”

The faint traces of a smirk fall from Will’s face. Matthew watches him, gritting his teeth together. He hears sirens crying from just far enough that he can swing the key ring once around his finger and stand languidly to his feet.

“Also,” he declares, insinuating himself into the opened fourth wall of Will’s cage to take his right hand in his left. Matthew’s right perches with the keys on the corner of the opening. He brings Will’s hand up to his face, wrist upturned and exposed like the underbelly of a dangerous, feral animal. “Since I was just your conduit anyway…”

Will’s eyes widen a fraction. His throat bobs once in a hard swallow. Matthew’s eyes droop closed when he presses a soft kiss into the dry, warm palm of Will’s hand, but he sees just as his lids cast him into darkness that Will’s tongue darts out to wet his lips. And if that isn’t just the damnedest thing, the sirens grow obnoxiously loud. Matthew stands up, blinks himself alert, and drops Will’s hand. It hovers where he releases it for a few moments before falling into Will’s lap. His expression is dazed. Something glitters in the shadows overtaking his eyes.

Matthew gently closes the door and steps away once the lock has been turned. He drops the keys at the first prompting for him to put his hands where they can be seen clearly and spares Will Graham a parting glance.

The eyes Matthew trusted to see him stare blankly as he’s taken away. He thinks he’s probably concerned about Hannibal, whether he lived. It occurs to Matthew that Will said the man was a cannibal, and actually, that puts their discussion about the Iroquois into a much more appropriate context. He smirks in spite of himself, reasoning that _somebody_ should laugh.

It’s a trying thing to do at the end of a rope. He’s at the end of his now.

With the look on Will’s face, though, probably it’s the case that Lecter isn’t; probably, he will be the one to get the last laugh. Somehow that seems appropriate, too. He’d had the air of a man who couldn’t be defeated, one accustomed to getting his way. After all, he wouldn’t be smoke if he could be caught by any passionate fanatic. He wouldn’t be the devil if the tide swelling in his muse couldn’t be turned after enough exposure to the seductive whisper of the shade.

Matthew is too far away from Will’s cage to hear what’s going on and he’s never been adept at reading lips, but he doesn’t doubt Hannibal Lecter survived him. Deeper than his nerve endings rests a conclusion that turns his stomach as he’s shoved into the backseat of a police car: the conclusion that Will may have meant for Hannibal to survive him—that he had used his proposition to take Hannibal down as a means of orchestrating Matthew’s arrest. He certainly set himself up to kill two birds with one stone, and honestly, Matthew should have expected something like it.

It occurs to him that something about Will’s attempt, whether it was sincere or not, victimizes Hannibal Lecter and shapes beasts out of himself and out of Matthew. Will had sent him like a lamb to the slaughter, only the slaughter was Hannibal. It was Hannibal all along, and Matthew witnessed all of it, but he hadn’t _seen._

_Ask him if he feels powerful._

As the engine kicks into life and carries him away into a dark world he could map with eyes closed but that he doesn’t understand, he finishes Lecter’s question, the real one: _Ask him if he feels powerful having enslaved you._

_Tell him I’m proud of him._

Matthew presses his forehead to the cold window and squeezes his eyes shut.

_Tell him I’m proud of him for earning his right to me._

Matthew thought tonight was about his rendering a sacrifice unto Will Graham, but maybe the latter had been the one to bring an offering. Lambs were sacrificed all the time in days long past.

_And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin. Is pride that apes humility._

It’s all wrong. It’s biology. It’s empathy. It’s night creeping in on him and surrounding him like fog.

_I don’t want to eat your sins, doctor. You fed enough of them to Will Graham._

Matthew smiles at the irony and endures the ride in calm, unaffected silence.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and lyrics by Chevelle
> 
> From Hans Zimmer’s “Let My Home Be My Gallows” (Hannibal Motion Picture Soundtrack): “I will not belabor the obvious parallel with Judas Iscariot, but Dante Alighieri needed no drawn illustration: it is his genius to make Pier della Vigna, now in Hell, speak in strained hisses and coughing sibilants as though he is hanging still.”
> 
> Translation of Dante’s _Inferno_ , Canto XIII  
> http://www.filmtracks.com/comments/titles/hannibal/index.cgi?read=207 
> 
> From Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Devil’s Thoughts”: “And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin / Is pride that apes humility.”
> 
> From Ratner’s _Red Dragon:_ “I might not have time.” “I do. I have oodles.”
> 
> Beta’d by the splendid catnip of my soul, Amandajean. <3


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